The Tulip Festival

One thing I am loving about living here so close to family? Dragging them to random events and on random excursions with me. And they even pretend to like it, like it was their idea to begin with. I love family. :)

Our trip to the Tulip Festival at Thanksgiving Point was quite an excursion. We had a BLAST. I was a little bit worried because we spent $8 each (which is still better than $10, thanks the coupon here) to go walk around a garden and look at flowers. And when we got there the bloomometer (a piece of paper stuck to the wall) was only at 35%. I decided that so long as we could at least enjoy the gardens for the same amount of time as a movie, it would be worth it. We stayed for 4 hours. :)

Even with only 35% of the flowers in bloom, the gardens were gorgeous. We did say, "Oh wow, that will be so beautiful... once everything is in bloom..." quite a bit, but that didn't stop us from enjoying it. I went a little bit crazy with my camera. If you want to see Dusty's fantastically awesome *professional* pictures, check them out on her blog here. Seriously, the girl has talent. But she's stingy. She took only about 8000 pictures and posted only 5. I, on the other hand, took about 100 pictures and will show them all to you. Just kidding, only half. Ish. In a photo collage. (I love that I know how to do these in Picasa now!) If you want to see the images in the photo collage larger, just click on the collage.

Isn't that pink one so dainty? These flowers were so pretty and so perfect to start spring for me.

We took a bunch of pictures of Pudge, too, of course. It's a good thing he's so ruggedly handsome and squishily adorable.

Check out the drooly chin in the top right...

And this one is my favorite (thanks, Les!).

To see some of the prettiest flowers, we had to hike this humungo hill:

Which of course wore this little trooper right out so he needed to kick up his feet and relax:

Can you pick out the wild animals?

 How about now?

 And now?

Yup, a horned owl and a Canadian goose, nesting (not together) on the (probably artificial) rock cliffs in the middle of the gardens. There was a very nice man who we hoped was an employee pointing them out to everyone who came by.

Leslee and her good eyes found this little fella:

And aren't those waterfalls pretty?

But the bagpiper wasn't too hard to find. I had fun finding these little plaques all over the park too. One from the Book of Mormon, one from the Bible, and one from the Irish. Quite diverse. :) Oh, and I thought the Jimmy sign was funny because that's what Mark's family still calls Paul...

In the clubhouse part of the garden, they were having Daffodil Days, which is really just a competition to see whose daffodil is the prettiest. I was surprised to see so many different types of daffodils. It makes me want to cultivate something (other than mold in my refrigerator... yuck).

So, Pudge, what did you think?

(The tongue is like a thumbs-up.)